rape, trauma, destruction, and death by the thousands

The war in the info, it’s not just a story of offensives and counter-offensives, it’s not just military strategy, it’s not limited to announcement effects, shocks emotional in front of the images of bombarded civilians, it is also and above all all the gray and black zones which slip into the interstices of the acts of war. The dislocated social fabric, death and destruction, trauma, prostrate and people dying by the thousands.

War is disgusting, and the reporter must make sure, and so much the worse for the anxiety-provoking character, to report it. This is the objective set by Maurine Mercier, a great Swiss reporter for RTS and Radio France. Record lyrics that carry the authenticity of a war of nuances.

Nothing is binary and especially not a war. Of course, there is an assaulted and an aggressor. But the attacked, especially in the face of a disproportion of forces, can also defend themselves with violence. We can never say enough to what extent war restores man to his animal character. From fear management to the ability to kill. Especially for an army that has many civilians in its ranks who left everything to join the front.

And in the interviews reported in the newspapers, we always have the strength, the bravery, the ability to resist. A soldier must show that he overcomes the test, the officer affirms better days, even when things are going badly. You don’t lose a war when you lose a battle. But on the weaknesses, the psyches which are weakening, the direction of what one does, which crumbles day after day, it is taboo. We will always have literature to tell it later, historians to document it, but in the present time, how can the war reporter evoke these gray areas?

Maurine Mercier set out to collect these precious words. It takes time. If we take the example of Youri, a rare testimony that the journalist collected, these are days and days of discussion with him. Trust is not enough.

In Mykolaiev, in the south of the country, Maurine will forge a link with Youri to obtain a rare word. That of the soldier’s vulnerability. Insomniac friends or those on the contrary who only sleep from exhaustion. The filth of war, we talk about gray areas, but it’s only black, risking your life and killing some to preserve your own, in the cities where you grew up, where you were a child and who are nothing but ruins, ashes, and bodies eaten by dogs, and you who must hide like an animal.

Hiding out in schools where the children no longer come, simply because there are no other places to go. Turn it into a barracks, and the Russian spies in civilian clothes give the coordinates for the school to be bombed with the surrounding residential areas, the famous collateral damage that takes innocent lives, and destroys everything they have built.

War is disgusting, people die in it, civilians but also soldiers. Friends around, Russians on the other side. Formerly brothers and cousins, today enemies animated by a fierce hatred, which leads to violence and exactions, an irrational hatred, the taste for blood, that of violence which calls for the violence of revenge, and in the background the loss of meaning, who wanted that? Why ? Where are the Nazis? Who should be freed and from what? We don’t know anything except that the one in the trench opposite is a son of a bitch who must be killed.

Maurine Mercier, the last winner of the Bayeux Calvados prize for war correspondents for her report on the rapes in Boutcha, attaches fundamental importance to this. Raped women, yet another voice of victims that must be sought. Days and days for hours of confession, but only once. Then she won’t talk about those eight soldiers who raped her through every hole except her ears, and she let her 13-year-old daughter be spared, they were drunk, they had killed before out of excitement, they hadn’t nothing human and were shooting at the gate to announce their arrival.

This award, with tears in her eyes, Maurine dedicated it to this woman who survived for her daughter, after wanting to die, she dedicated it to all the victims who speak out to document this war, because yes, and definitely yes , war is disgusting, and even those who want to fight it, die in it.